How to survive an international flight with Toddler Triplets

When planning an overseas trip with Toddler Triplets there are a lot of factors to take into account, especially regarding car hire and hotel rooms. In this post I will focus on the things that you can do in the lead up to your travel that can make a real difference to the way your toddler handles the Flight.
I hope that this post will be useful to anyone planning to fly with toddlers not just those with multiples.

1: Let them know what to expect.

For at least a couple of weeks before the flight I planned role play activities that followed the steps that we would go through at the airport and on the flight. I made paper passports and boarding passes for everyone, they had to hand over their passport and tell the check-in lady (me) their name and age in order to get their boarding passes. They then had to give the boarding passes to the flight attendant (me) and find the seat with the same number as their boarding pass. We would then fly somewhere in our Aeroplane and get out for a play before going through the whole process again to fly back home.

We looked at lots of brochures about the places that we were going to and Googled photo’s of airports and the inside of a plane, as well as the places that we would be visiting. We also got some childrens books out of the Library about traveling.

2: Get them excited about the holiday.

I created a countdown calendar for the last 10 days before we flew. I took 11 white envelopes and drew the numbers 1 to 10 on them, on the 11th envelope I wrote the word Holiday. I asked the Trio to colour in the envelopes and used Blu tack to stick them all to the living room door. In each envelope I placed a piece of paper with a travel related activity written on it. Each morning I told the Trio how many days were left until we were going on holiday and one of them got to open the envelope to find out what activity we were going to do that day. The activities ranged from reading a book about travel or making paper planes to making foam bubble clouds for their toy planes to fly through and of course Role playing.

3: Pack a selection of travel friendly toys.

We packed a few activity books, some magnetic puzzles and a pencil case each containing a couple of toy cars and their favourite small action figures/dolls.

More importantly we packed 3 IPad Mini’s loaded up with their favourite movies and games along with their child safe headphones. This is one of the occasions that I was happy for all 3 kids to just sit still and watch a movie on their IPads – There was plenty of exercise for them once we landed!

4: Invest in some special “travel pants”.
I know that every child is different when it comes to potty training so this advice may or may not be useful to you.
The trio had been doing really well with their toilet training and we were at a point where we could go out for the day without any accidents. I knew that it would be a lot to expect from them to sit for the whole flight without any accidents and decided to put them in Pull ups training pants for the journey. The training pants are made to look a bit more like undies than the standard pull ups so I told the Trio that they were special Travel pants and that they still needed to tell Mummy if they needed the toilet. This worked a treat for us because all 3 continued to tell us when they needed to go but the inevitable wee’s that happened while they were sleeping were contained so no bags of wet stinky clothes for us to deal with.

5: Give them ownership of their travel bag.

Toddlers like to feel in control so I made sure that they were involved with packing their bags and they also got to choose which toys were going on holiday with them. We took this idea to another level and purchased Trunki suitcases which are small enough to be taken on the plane as carry-on luggage but still managed to fit most of the clothes and toys they took with them . For a couple of weeks before the holiday the Trunki’s were in the living room and everyone was allowed to ride on them whenever they wanted to (within reason). By the time that we went on holiday the Trio were not only expert Trunki riders but they were also very attached to their luggage, to the point that they kept pointing out to us whenever the bags were taken away by a porter or a taxi driver. There was no way we were going to lose those Trunki’s!! (They even spotted their Trunki’s in the storage area of the hotel after we had checked out and were worried that we had forgotten to take them with us.)

By the time we were at the airport and ready to fly, the Triplets were experts on the whole process and they sailed through the whole experience without any fuss. We even received comments from other passengers and the Airline staff about how well behaved the triplets were.